Forget IIMs, shift focus to schools

Last time I wrote about Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s senseless, wasteful interference in the affairs of the Indian Institutes of Management ou...

Last time I wrote about Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s senseless, wasteful interference in the affairs of the Indian Institutes of Management our Minister of HRD was so incensed he rang me, early on Sunday morning, and let me have it. How dare I write without at least asking him why he was doing what he was doing? Did I know how much money was being spent on the wrong things? Did I know that these were government institutions and so came under his direct control? Did I know that they were headed not by officials but by the brightest businessmen in India? The tirade ended only when I promised to do a full interview with the minister which, alas, I have not been able to yet but cannot resist writing about education again because I cannot believe that Mr Joshi continues to waste time interfering in our finest institutions when there is so much that he could be doing instead.

Emboldened by the Supreme Court ruling that the Human Resource Development ministry had the right to decide IIM fee structures HRD officials began throwing threats and weight around last week. Inevitable after the Supreme Court8217;s mystifying judgement but stupid when you consider how much needs to be done for school education.

Often in this column I have written about the need for Indian education to be Indianised, often I have lamented the absurdity of generations of Indian schoolchildren still being subjected to an education system that was set up by Lord Macaulay. He of the famous Macaulay Minute that dismissed everything ever written in Indian languages as worth less than a single shelf in an English kindergarten. He who chose English over Hindi as the language of schools because the British Raj needed armies of Indian clerks. I have never understood why a new system of school education was not set up by the first government of independent India. But, then Jawaharlal Nehru, as he himself admitted, was our last British Prime Minister. And, since it was his heirs, and his party, who ruled us for much of our independent years how could change possibly happen?

So, I had great hopes of Mr Joshi. As a proud Hindutva fanatic I had hoped that we would make changes in the Indian school curriculum that desperately need to be made. Take literature for a start. It is shameful that Indian children leave school with a deeper knowledge of Western literature than our own. Masters of tokenism that we are, we pay lip service to Kalidasa and Tagore but when it comes to contemporary Indian writing the great majority of Indian school-children have no idea what is going on in other languages. North Indian children have no way of discovering what is being written in Tamil and Malyalam and South Indian children have no knowledge of Ghalib and Iqbal or of anything that might be being written these days in Hindi or Bengali. Should it not be the task of the Ministry of HRD to ensure that excellent translations are made available in Indian languages and not just in English? Speaking for myself, may I say that I recognised the absurdity of our situation when the first sub-titled Satyajit Ray film I ever saw was in Helsinki. In a writing context the consequence of Indian children not reading books in their own languages is that the only Indian writers who have acquired a degree of celebrity are those who write in English. This is sad when you consider how mediocre many of these writers are compared to those writing in Indian languages.

History is another subject that needs change at the school level, not to eliminate references to Brahmins eating beef but to understand it better. For this we do not need to extinguish the Marxist historians but to supplement their version of what happened to India with another viewpoint. It is important for Indian children to leave school feeling proud of their history instead of slightly embarrassed by how easy it was for foreigners to obliterate the achievements of Indian civilisation.

There are aspects of Indian civilisation that remain untaught on grounds of secularism and this needs to be changed. Why should the Mahabharata and the Ramayana not be studied in Indian schools? Why should Indian religions not be up for examination?

We live in a world that shrinks every day because of technological and communication advances. And, according to one estimate, by the year 2020 India will have the largest population of 21-year-olds in the world. If we do not make a serious effort to improve school education these young Indians are likely to be little more than second rate clones of their Western brothers and sisters. The fate of second rate people is forever second rate.

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If we want to be that shining superpower that we are told daily we are going to become then we have to be first rate and we can only be first rate if we can provide school children with first rate education. At the moment we have a handful of first rate Indian schools, all using English as the medium of instruction. We also have a handful of excellent institutions of higher education in a sea of mediocre universities that crumble and decay with every passing year. Mr Joshi must have a very twisted sense of priority to choose our best institutions as his first target for improvement. If you are reading this Joshiji I promise to come and do that interview soon but I cannot think of much you could say that would change my view that if Atal Behari Vajpayee becomes Prime Minister again he must make Education a full ministry and find someone other than you to head it.

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